Instructions

ZOOM IN by clicking on the page. A slider will appear, allowing you to adjust your zoom level. Return to the original size by clicking on the page again.

MOVE the page around when zoomed in by dragging it.

ADJUST the zoom using the slider on the top right.

ZOOM OUT by clicking on the zoomed-in page.

SEARCH by entering text in the search field and click on "In This Issue" or "All Issues" to search the current issue or the archive of back issues respectively. If you would like to clear the your search, click on your browser refresh button.

PRINT by clicking on thumbnails to select pages, and then press the
print button.

SHARE this publication and page.

ROTATE PAGE allows you to turn pages 90 degrees clockwise or counterclockwise.Click on the page to return to the original orientation. To zoom in on a rotated page, return the page to its original orientation, zoom in, and
then rotate it again.

CONTENTS displays a table of sections with thumbnails and descriptions.

ALL PAGES displays thumbnails of every page in the issue. Click on
a page to jump.

7
Policy • Vol. 31 No. 1 • Autumn 2015
Free Speech SympoSium
DoWN iNTo The DeTAiLS
You may not be the free speech advocate you think you are.
that broke its pre-election promise on this) and say
a few words about hate speech and Section 18C.
Two Ways of Supporting Free Speech
In the liberal tradition you have your Capulets and
your Montagues, or call them your natural law
believers and your consequentialists. The former
is the home of Locke, and Jefferson, and many of
the thinkers of the Enlightenment that came from
continental Europe and especially France. The latter
is the home of John Stuart Mill, and Bentham, and
Hume, and that part of the Enlightenment we
would trace back to Scotland. Let me lay my cards
on the table. I am firmly in Mill’s and Hume’s camp.
I am a consequentialist (of which utilitarianism is a
sub-branch).
But let’s start with natural law arguments, which
are of the sort where you claim something is a good-
in-itself (a right to equality, perhaps, or to property,
or to free speech). Hence on this way of thinking
we humans are entitled to these things just because
we are humans; or because of some convoluted
social contract argument; or because that’s what a
benevolent, theistic God wants. We are entitled to
this claimed thing regardless of the consequences
that are likely to attach to granting it to us. For me,
natural law claims are nothing more than repackaged
theology. At core they are other-
worldly, and unconvincing. They
work especially badly in the realm
of free speech. And I say that
while thinking that Tim Wilson’s
defence of free speech is essentially
a natural law one. But he won’t
I
n my short ten to twelve minutes I want to do
three things. Firstly, I want to give you a potted
account of the two main philosophical schools
of thought in the Western tradition that
support classical liberalism generally, and support
plenty of scope for free speech more particularly.
Next I want to make this claim—I want to
argue that at some point in order to test someone’s
commitment to free speech you have to put aside
the abstract arguments and look to see his or her
answers in specific scenarios as to whether speech
should be tolerated or suppressed. Put differently,
up in the Olympian heights of abstractions virtually
everyone can—and in fact just about everyone
does—claim to be in favour of free speech. Heck,
even Tim Wilson’s colleague the Race Relations
Commissioner purports to believe in free speech. So
does Mr. Finkelstein. So does the Green Party. So I
say we need to descend down into the quagmire of
real-life free speech issues to see where people stand.
If you are in favour of suppressing speech in
some rare scenario here or there, say incitement to
murder or blocking publication of a new, easy-to-
make biological weapon, then I say that is still quite
compatible with a strong attachment to free speech.
But as the instances grow of when you would silence
speech, the plausibility of your being “committed
to free speech” becomes ever more tenuous. If
preferencing someone’s desire not to be offended
counts more for you than allowing lots of scope
for articulating views that will inevitably offend
others, you’re not really a free speech adherent. Put
bluntly, many people who profess an attachment to
free speech palpably do not have one. So I will run
through some real life scenarios and you can decide
for yourselves if you’d allow or suppress speech.
Lastly, I want to test your patience (and I suppose
the patience of Liberal senator Dean Smith, my
fellow panellist and member of this government
James Allan is Garrick Professor of Law at the university
of Queensland.